While we’re busy doing what we do each day, it’s easy to get trapped in repetitive actions. Sometimes you just need to have a little challenge – something that refocuses your thinking.

In his newsletters, one of my favorite artists, Robert Burridge, creates a composition of the month – a structure of lines, curves or dots that can serve as the “bones” of a painting. This month he featured overlapping frames and squares.

The concept challenged me to take a little time away from my usual routine to do some painting just for me; to refocus my reason for painting so that I’m not creating an almost fully resolved work in my mind before I begin, but rather, I’m concentrating on lines and shapes and building the painting from there. Whatever happens, happens.

“Beyond the Sea” (8×10” acrylic and oil pastel) is the first result of this exercise. Robert’s idea is to create a sketch of overlapping frames and squares and to use that sketch as a composition foundation for a series of paintings. I decided to “narrowcast” a bit and, while I did a sketch which you can see here, I decided to base a series of paintings on cropped sections of the sketch (photo at left). The idea is to search for a pleasing composition in the jumble of lines and shapes and the painting flies from there.